PRESS BRIEFING BY
SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR BRUCE BABBITT
AND CHAIR OF COUNCIL ON ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY GEORGE FRAMPTON

The Briefing Room

10:21 A.M. EST

MR. SIEWERT: As you know, the President will have a statement
at 11:30 a.m. today. Here to brief you on the particulars of that
statement are George Frampton, Chair of the Council on Environmental
Quality; and Bruce Babbitt, Secretary of the Interior. This briefing is
on the record and on camera, but it is embargoed until noon. Thank you.

MR. FRAMPTON: Good morning, I'm George Frampton. The
President will have two announcements this morning regarding our ongoing
efforts to protect critical lands across this country. And I think both
announcements are very much in the spirit of a series of initiatives
that the administration has taken in the conservation field, from the
northwest forest plan, California desert, acquisition of Headwaters
Forest, protection of Yellowstone, the recent agreement to purchase the
Baca Ranch in New Mexico, and the restoration of the Everglades
ecosystem.

The first announcement the President will have is that we are
forwarding today to Congress a list of 18 places that we propose to
protect through acquisition with the funding that was secured a few
weeks ago by the President in the recent budget negotiations. The
administration secured a total of $652 million this year for our Lands
Legacy program, which is a 42 percent increase over last year. A
substantial portion of those funds are already allocated to particular
projects in places like the California desert, Baca Ranch and
Everglades.

But we were able to get an additional $35 million that is not
yet allocated, so these are the administration's proposals for
concurrence by the appropriations committees for the specific projects
for the use of that money. And some of those -- there are 18 in all:
17 acquisitions and one acquisition of grazing rights north of
Yellowstone National Park.

Some of the projects include Pelican Island National Wildlife
Refuge in Florida, which was the first wildlife refuge created by Teddy
Roosevelt; steps toward the acquisition of the birth home and burial
place of Martin Luther King in Atlanta; Hawaii; civil war battlefields;
acreage within the mountains to Sound Greenway in Washington State,
linking the Cascades to Puget Sound; and other projects.

Second, the President will announce that he has received from
Secretary Babbitt, in response to a request that he made roughly a year
ago to the Secretary, recommendations for the designation of three new
national monuments, under the Antiquities Act of 1906, and for the
expansion of a fourth national monument. And the President will also
say that he will study the recommendations and hopes to reach a decision
on them early in the year.

The four proposed, recommended monuments which the Secretary
will describe in more detail in a minute are as follows: The largest
one is a million-acre monument, part of the BLM land and national
recreation land north of the Grand Canyon, going right down to the north
rim of the Grand Canyon. The second, also in Arizona, is an area of
about 70,000 acres north of Phoenix, which is very rich in archeological
sites, petroglyphs and other important archeological objects.

The other two are in California. First, the designation of a
new national monument to protect all of the coastal islands off the
coast of California, up and down the coast, that are owned by the
federal government; and fourth is the expansion of an existing national
monument, Pinnacles National Monument, about 65 miles south of San Jose,
about due east of Monterey, which was initially created by Teddy
Roosevelt, I believe, in 1908, and has been expanded several times since
then.

And Secretary Babbitt is going to describe the four
recommendations in somewhat more detail, and then we'll be available to
take questions. Thank you.

SECRETARY BABBITT: Good morning. I think it's by now
well-known that there is an interactive process going on with respect to
the protection of public lands in many areas of the West. And this
process has been characterized by many meetings and field trips with the
residents of local communities and local officials who are interest in
expanding the protection of public lands.

In a number of cases, the Congress has been directly involved
in this process. For example, in the state of Oregon, there are two
sites now under intense public discussion in a collaborative process
with the entire Oregon delegation, Republicans and Democrats, and with
the active involvement of Governor Kitzhaber. To some degree, that
process is now going on in Colorado as well, where I will travel at the
end of this week to the San Luis Valley, along with Senator Allard,
Congressman McInnis and the Attorney General and other members of the
Colorado leadership.

It's in that context that I have recommended, and today
recommend to the President that he use his authority under the
Antiquities Act to designate two sites in Arizona and two in California.

Now, I guess, inevitably, I start by telling you about the two
sites in Arizona. The are, of course, well-known to me as someone who
grew up in Arizona. They have the enthusiastic support of a
distinguished former governor of Arizona -- (laughter) -- and, of
course, I have had a long and great relationship with Grand Canyon
National Park. The first one, as George described, about 1 million
acres, is in, in a very real sense, a part of Grand Canyon.

The Grand Canyon was established as a national monument by
Teddy Roosevelt back in 1908. But it was just a central core of the
canyon. And since then, successor Presidents have used their power to
-- under the Antiquities Act to expand that canyon, often with some
initial controversy, but always richly vindicated in history. I know
that, because member of my own family, who have been out there for
generations, were often among the opponents of presidential use of the
Antiquities Act, only, inevitably, years later to do a little
revisionist history and to claim leadership in originating those ideas.

Okay, enough stories. The bottom line is that the Grand
Canyon is still not fully protected. Congress took a crack at it back
in the 1970s, and looked at some of this area, and wound up undecided,
and asked the Secretary of the Interior to do a study. That study, of
course, gathered the dust that most studies do in my department, until
it was rediscovered by a public lands archaeologist about a year ago.

The addition is characterized by the fact that it's within the
drainage of the Grand Canyon. This is a remote area on the north rim.
It covers the drainage of Andrus Canyon, Parashant Canyon, and
Cottonwood Wash. It's in fact where the Grand Canyon begins on the
north side. It's where the rain and the snow, running off the land,
move through the side canyons of the Colorado tributaries and then join
the Colorado River.

Now, the second one in Arizona is a remarkable site that has
escaped the attention of the public for a long time. As you drive north
from metropolitan Phoenix, you will see the inevitable sprawl that kind
of metastasizes across the landscape. And you will be in subdivisions
and real estate developments all the way, about an hour out of Phoenix
-- 60, 70 miles north -- where suddenly the interstate ramps up about
1,000 feet. And miraculously, you are then in a pristine, very rugged
landscape of mesas and ramparts and deep canyons, which harbor an entire
archaeological civilization that built a fortified community less than
1,000 years ago. There are half a dozen huge pueblos, several hundred
rooms. There are fortifications along the ramparts, lookout towers.

It's been rediscovered because archaeologists are now
beginning to undertand that you really understand ancient civilizations
not by just digging artifacts out of a grave or a ruin, but by
understanding how communities interacted across landscapes.

Incidentally, this will provide a remarkable de facto growth
boundary to the city of Phoenix. And I believe this is going to have
the enthusiastic support of the mayor and many of the leaders who are
struggling with the kinds of sprawl issues that the Vice President has
discussed so frequently and so persuasively.

Okay, I'll ramp out on California. The first one is the
California islands. Now, lest you think that this is an archeapeligo
the size of Indonesia, let me just say that these are small, uninhabited
islands. In fact, many people think of them as rocks. (Laughter.) I
think of them as a part of our natural heritage.

You can see them from the shoreline at Monterey, or if you go
out to the Presidio in San Francisco; those are those rocks where all
the vast flocks of birds are coming in where the pelicans are multing at
breeding time -- that kind of thing. They really are a treasure, and
the time is now at hand to make certain that they are protected.

There are several thousand of them. They will continue to be
administered under my recommendation, jointly by the Bureau of Land
Management and the California Department of Game and Fish.

The last one, as George said, is Pinnacles National Monument.
Now, I dare say that none of you hardworking members of the press have
ever been there. In fact, I arrived there a month ago to learn that no
Secretary of the Interior in history had been seen within a day's drive
of this place, and that the regional director of the National Park
Service, based in San Francisco, had never even been there. (Laughter.)
But it is a wonderful place.

It is an island mountain extending out of the lower lands,
kind of a central valley where it kind of moves up into the coastal
range. It's being increasingly discovered by the people in the South
Bay and San Jose who use it as rock climbing and as a refuge from all
the sprawl. If you stand in that area, you can now look out across the
subdivisions, which are beginning to encroach, which is the explanation
for my recommendation to the President that we create a larger protected
area.

I'd be happy to answer any questions.

Q Secretary Babbitt, the area in California, these uninhabited
islands, rocks, however you want to describe them, what is the current
threat against those, and does this include any area of seabed that is
currently being used for oil exploration?

SECRETARY BABBITT: To answer your second question, my
recommendation does not extend to the seabed, and there's a good reason
for that. The seabed out to 12 miles is owned and administered by the
state of California, and the Antiquities Act may or may not cover the
seabed in the abstract. But my recommendation is purely the rocks,
purely the land above mean high tide.

What's the threat? Well, there are all kinds of
possibilities. The ingenuity that people use for mineral location in
mining is almost beyond belief. I was reading today about a mineral
location that has been made for the purpose of mining ingredients for
kitty litter. There's a mineral location in Arizona, where the San
Francisco Peaks are being loaded into dump trucks for grit for the
washing and manufacture of stonewashed jeans. And there has been a
variety of those kinds of proposals from people thinking that these
rocks might look better ground up and merchandised.

The nesting grounds of the birds are particularly important.
There has been some guano activity in the ancient past on some of these
islands -- no longer as valuable as it was 100 years ago. But those are
the kinds of things that need to be protected.

Q Mr. Secretary, could you explain the President's executive
authority, what he can do? Is this basically the federal equivalent of
eminent domain, that he can just take these over?

SECRETARY BABBITT: It is the exact antithetical opposite of
eminent domain, because I would hasten to say that these are public
lands. We're not talking, here, about privately owned lands, and you
should immediately disregard all of these allegations that somehow there
is privately owned property involved in this. There isn't. These lands
are owned by the people of the United States.

Now, the Antiquities Act of 1906 is a statute in which the
Congress explicitly gave the President the power to designate areas of
historic and cultural and scientific interest, and in so doing to remove
them from the application of statutes like the Mining Law of 1872. And
I might add that there is an extraordinary record of presidential
leadership, over the last nearly 100 years, in using this act. Many, if
not most, of our greatest national parks began as withdrawals by the
President under the Antiquities Act.

And there are some surprising facts. For example, Herbert
Hoover -- not often remembered as one of the most dynamic users of
executive authority -- set aside 2 million acres under the Antiquities
Act, including the beginnings of Death Valley and a whole variety of
archaeological monuments. The inimitable Theodore Roosevelt, of course,
set aside 1.5 million acres. And every President of the 20th century --
only three exceptions -- has used this act to establish national
monuments. Not a single one of them has ever been revoked, either by a
subsequent President or by the Congress. Not one. So that's sort of
the background, I think, in which I would frame my recommendations.

Q Could you be a bit more explicit about what activities are
precluded by this designation? You said -- is mining completely
precluded by the designation, and are there any other activities?
Grazing can continue?

SECRETARY BABBITT: The President retains the discretion under
the act to specify in the proclamation of withdrawal, which laws will or
will not be applicable and which uses will or will not be permitted.

Now, I think the Grand Staircase withdrawal illustrates some
of these issues. First of all, there is, I think, without exception,
always been a withdrawal of the mining law of 1872. Without exception,
that would certainly be my recommendation to the President here. Mining
is somewhat incompatible with protecting the scenic vistas of the Grand
Canyon. It's not very healthy for archaeological sites to have mining.
That's kind of a given.

My recommendation to the President on these would be that, as
we did at the Escalante Monument, that grazing be continued, subject to
good management practices and protecting the biodiversity of the
landscape. Grazing, properly administered, is not an incompatible use.

Timber cutting -- commercial timber cutting would be, I would
recommend be prohibited, as it was in the Grand Staircase Escalante. I
think there actually are a few trees in the Grand Staircase Escalante,
but there are quite a few of them at Pinnacles and at Grand Canyon. But
that use would be withdrawn.

The use of off-road vehicles is an increasingly problemmatic
issue on public lands, and we handled that at the Grand Staircase
Escalante by a management plan which says vehicles will be restricted to
designated roads. It's not like a wilderness area where you say no
vehicles, but the idea would be to manage them in a very proper and
restrictive way. That would be my recommendation with respect to these
monuments as well.

Q In an other recent declaration, you had quite a bit of
rumbling from Congress, Democrats and Republicans both, about the
President's use of executive authority. Have you worked with them more
on this than you did on previous declarations?

SECRETARY BABBITT: As I explained at the outset, I think we
have a very good process going with the Congress. It is working better
in some places than others. We've already had some success.

This process, in many ways, began at Otay Mountain just
outside of San Diego in the summer of 1996. And the discussion
originally focused on the possibility of my making a recommendation to
the President. And then it went into another direction in which the
Republican and Democratic delegation members said, no, we'd like to make
it a wilderness area. And I said, well, you could have fooled me, you
know. You want a more restrictive congressional designation, be my
guest. That bill is now on the President's desk. There's a very
interesting process going on in the Santa Rosa Mountains, outside of
Palm Springs, where Congresswoman Bono is now preparing legislation that
we've been deeply involved in.

As I said before, the California recommendations that I made
are certainly influenced by the fact that Congressman Farr had drawn up
these bills and introduced them, and had gotten no response at all. As
a member of Congress, he did not even get a hearing. And it was Sam
Farr's recommendation to me -- he has independently written the
President asking that this should be done, and he has very effectively
lobbied me. And I think there's been adequate discussion, and a chance
for Congress to take a look at it.

It's a little different in Arizona. We can get into that, to
the extent that anybody wants to.

Q How many areas are you looking at as possible monuments
nationally? And forgive a parochial question, but are you looking at
any in Utah, such as San Rafael Swell?

SECRETARY BABBITT: Well, this is -- as I explained to the
House Resources Committee, I don't have a list. Everything that we have
done has been in the light of day. We have traveled and held
proceedings and discussions and field trips, I would say, on about a
dozen sites in the West. We have not done that in Utah, because I have
a developing relationship with Governor Leavitt, which has been very
productive in terms of the Utah Land Exchange, which was a major
achievement for the Governor, for the Congress and for this
administration.

We've been working on a management plan for the Escalante
Monument, and in that context, what I've said to the Governor is, we
have the makings of a productive relationship, and we've got plenty on
our plate, and so we are not -- there's no other agenda for Utah at this
time.

Q You mentioned the previous designations had never been
revoked by successor Presidents. Does that mean they can be?

SECRETARY BABBITT: It's not clear. All I can say is, for 100
years it has never been done. What a court would say, in interpreting
the Antiquties Act I wouldn't even guess at. I've long since passed my
legal expertise.

Q What kind of appropriations committee concurrence is needed
on the land legacy projects? And, secondly, what were the three
Presidents that did not withdraw land under the Antiquities Act?

SECRETARY BABBITT: Land legacy -- I'm going to let George
Frampton step up and answer that question. The three Presidents were
Nixon, Reagan, Bush.

Q Is there a pattern there? (Laughter.)

SECRETARY BABBITT: George.

MR. FRAMPTON: The understanding which we have with the
Congress on the recommendations for the use of the additional monies
follows the same pattern of previous use of federal acquisition money
under the Land and Water Conservation Fund. That is, the administration
makes recommendations for the designation of different projects, and the
Appropriations Committee concurs or suggests changes. That's usually
done through the chairs and the ranking members of the House and Senate
Appropriations subcommittees are the key people, and it's akin to the
reprogramming authority. We send a letter, they yea, no, or change.

Q Mr. Secretary, one other thing. What is it that you get
from declaring it a national monument that you can't already do because
there are public lands? Does that allow you, for instance, to set aside
mining rights and that sort of thing?

SECRETARY BABBITT: No. The proclamation -- every one to my
knowledge that's been issued, and certainly the Escalante and certainly
my recommendation would be that. All proclamations carry a phrase,
"subject to valid existing rights." And to the extent that there is,
for example, a mining claim which has been perfected, it remains
unaffected by the proclamation.

Now, the importance of these designations -- whether by the
President under the Antiquities Act, by the Congress through use of the
Wilderness Act or creating a national conservation area, creating a
legislative monument; there are many others -- the importance of the
designation is I think it's a statement that what these lands are is
sufficiently important that we ought to commit to keeping them intact in
perpetuity; that they are a part of our American heritage and that they
will be held and administered for that purpose. Out of all other uses,
some will be permitted, but all other uses will be subordinate to the
fact that they are dedicated in perpetuity as part of our national
heritage.

Q Mr. Secretary, is this an attempt to curry favor among
environmentalists for the Vice President's campaign?

SECRETARY BABBITT: This is an attempt to curry favor with the
American people by saying, as virtually every President has done
throughout this century, we are attempting to preserve and pass on the
very best of America's natural heritage, of its history, of its
archaeology, of its great open landscapes.

Q And if it helps Al Gore?

SECRETARY BABBITT: Maybe -- it would really be something if
all of the candidates would opine on presidential use of the Antiquities
Act, and step up and tell the American people how they feel about this
kind of project.

Q And I had one other question. What do you say to logging
interests, other people who would like to use this land to criticize the
President as creating forest-based museums so that we could walk through
the forest at some point in the future and say, look at all this
wonderful timber that's going to waste?

I have to say, in all fairness, if I could, Mr. Secretary,
based on modern-day harvesting procedures, could use the forest and
still maintain its integrity.

SECRETARY BABBITT: I would say to the author of that
question, buy a plane ticket, got to Sea-Tac Airport with destination
Portland, Oregon on a clear day, and fly out over the old growth forests
of the Cascades and look at the devastation that has taken place
historically in the name of we have to have access to every last acre of
land. It simply isn't the case.

We have a lot of timberlands in this country, we have a huge
private base of timberlands. They are being administered in an
effective and increasingly sustainable way, but there are parts of God's
creation which I believe, the American people would like to see intact
forever. Thank you.

Q Can you address Bob Stump's concerns about Shivwits, in
particular, about this being about at least a third larger than any
previous proposal and Stump says you're short-circuiting the process
that has been going on in this particular area.

SECRETARY BABBITT: Well, the Shivwits has obviously been
front and center very publicly for one year. I've personally presided
over public meetings in Colorado City and in Flagstaff. My staff and
Molly McUsic, who is the motivating force in much of this, has visited
-- she's from North Carolina. I don't think she had ever been to
Arizona, but I can tell you, she knows the Arizona strip better than 99
percent of the people in Arizona. We have talked, worked, listened, and
come to the following conclusions.

First of all, I make a recommendation to the President because
we're not making it on the legislative front. Congressman Stump
introduced a bill some months ago; I was very disappointed, to say the
least. I went up to the Natural Resources Committee and said, this bill
actually reduces the level of protection. It doesn't restrict mining,
it encourages mining by mandating more mineral studies and leaving it
open to unrestricted entry under the Mining Act of 1872. That's just a
non-starter.

As I explained before, the original trip that I took out there
looked at an area -- at the entire area sort of with the idea of an
arbitrary boundary kind of drawn across, to kind of come across the
north side of Mt. Trumbull, over the Nevada border and then connect up
with the Kaibab National Forest.

What I saw when we were on the landscape, to my surprise, was
that it doesn't make any sense, that the arbitrary line was repeating
the inadequate vision of the past -- that if we're going to protect the
Grand Canyon, we've got to protect the waters that create it, and the
watersheds that generate the waterfalls, the topography of the side
canyons, and the river. And that means following out the drainage of
those canyons I mentioned -- Parashant, Andrus, Cottonwood Wash. And
you will see that the boundary reflects exactly that hydrographic and
topographic divide.

Q Secretary Babbitt, can I just follow on something you said
just a moment ago? You talked about the Northwest. And the logging
industry says that any time an environmentalist wants to set aside a
piece of forest, they pull out the photographs of the old forestry
management techniques that show these huge clear-cuts, but that do not
accurately reflect modern forestry management techniques.

SECRETARY BABBITT: Well, I can show you a lot of modern
forestry management that is -- caused by whatever practice -- still
plainly apparent to be clear-cut. Now, the second fact is that the
biologists and ecologists -- clearly if we want to protect the salmon
streams of the Pacific Northwest and restore those endangered species,
there need to be places where this kind of just terribly disruptive
activity is off limits. And that's the philosophy underlying the
Northwest Forest plan. It's not a major issue in my recommendations to
the President. I haven't heard a word from the timber industry,
frankly. They're not opposed to it, or if they are, they've been very
quiet. And the reason is that there's no commercial harvest in the
rocks and islands, and no trees in the rocks and islands, okay?

I don't think there's ever been any timber cutting in and
around Pinnacles. It's an isolated kind of little desert island. The
timber cutting in the Grand Canyon/Parashant was phased out in the
1960s. It's just not --

Q But there's plenty in the Cascades.

SECRETARY BABBITT: Yes, but I'm not making any
recommendations about the Cascades today.

Q I thought you were making a recommendation to the Lands
Legacy Act.

SECRETARY BABBITT: Well, that's for Mr. Frampton.
(Laughter.)

Q Mr. Secretary, the Arizona congressional delegation is
concerned there hasn't been enough citizen input. And you've mentioned
the meetings that you've had there. Can you give examples on how
citizen input has impacted or changed your mind, so you can say these
meetings have worked -- tell the delegations these meetings weren't for
show, we have listened to the residents and we've changed our plans
because of that.

SECRETARY BABBITT: Yes, sure. When we had the hearings in
Phoenix over the Black Mesa-Perry Mesa-Agua Fria area, we had -- my
initial impression was that this BLM land is kind of an area that moves
north between the two national forests and is bracketed on the north by
a national forest, and that it would make sense to include the entire
area. As a result of the discussions, we excluded from my
recommendation to the President the west side of Interstate 17, about
half of the BLM area there, because there were a variety of improvements
and resource conflicts. There had been below the mesas, on the west
side of I-17, there are a lot of mineral claims. It's really part of
the Bradshaw Mountain mining district. And, to the contrary, on the
east side of I-17, there's been virtually no mineral activity now or
ever. So it was -- I think that's an example.

MR. FRAMPTON: Let me clarify the discussion about forests.
I don't think there's any commercial timber land at all, at least none
that's of any significance, in the four monument recommendations that
are coming to the President today.

Q I'm talking about the Lands Legacy set-aside.

MR. FRAMPTON: The one acquisition that I think you're talking
about is a $3.7 million proposal to purchase some land from Plum Creek
Timber Company, a willing seller, which is actually a part of a larger
land exchange called the I-90 Land Exchange, that was worked out in a
huge negotiation between Plum Creek, the Forest Service, the
environmental community over the last year. They came to an agreement,
Congress ratified that agreement in the Appropriations bill, in fact,
wrote in as a legislative language, enabling language for this land
exchange. And a part of the final deal was that the company escrowed
some additional acreage which the federal government promised to try to
buy to complete the overall pattern of that land exchange.

And this is our commitment to do that. And it's a willing
seller. It's part of a deal which I think is a spectacular deal. In
effect, the federal government bought some cutover land that was very,
very valuable, and some other potential lands that have not been cut
that are needed for habitat protection. And in the final analysis,
virtually the entire environmental community in Washington State, the
timber company, the Forest Service, and the governor, the state lands
division, all came together in this agreement. And this is sort of our
commitment to the final piece of it.

Q What about the Lake Logan set-aside in North Carolina?

MR. FRAMPTON: That I'm not familiar with. We'll try to get
you some information.

Q There's a lot of selective hardwood cutting in that area.

MS. LANCE: It's part of the Champion Paper property that they
have put on the market. So they are selling it to someone, and the
question is, will the Forest Service --

Q I only ask these questions, sir, because when we look at the
other side of the coin, the loggers will say, we're engaging in
responsible forestry management techniques and we're being chipped away
at a little piece at a time. You're putting, particularly in the North
Carolina, West Virginia, Virginia area, mom and pop operations out of
business. And I'm just wondering why these two things in your mind
aren't compatible.

MR. FRAMPTON: Well, I guess I would say that in the southeast
there are some very significant issues about forest health and timber
supply, and the future of the timber industry -- paper pulp mills and so
forth, pollution -- there are a lot of issues, but the question of
whether public lands would be taken out of the timber base is an almost
negligible portion of that set of issues.

There is so little public land, public commercially viable
timber, in the southeast that is going to be -- what's going to be
protected is already sort of designated for protection, or protected.
So the public lands -- public timber land is such a tiny proportion of
the timber supply and it's mostly protected. So the question of public
timber supply is definitely still an issue, big issue in places like
Montana and Idaho, and even eastern Washington and eastern Oregon, but
I don't think it's a big part of the future economy or future of the
timber and paper and pulp industry in the southeast.